Turn on the Cash: After a Year, ‘Spider-Man’ Earns Its Weekly Keep

Reeve Carney, center, star of “Spider-Man,” with fellow Spider-Men on 42nd Street on Thanksgiving. After a dramatic path to Broadway, the show makes more than its operating costs weekly.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

One year after naysayers were predicting a quick death, the musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is doubling down on Broadway, forgoing potentially lucrative overseas tours in the near term to try to refine the New York production and burnish the long-term value of the show.

In an interview to mark the Monday anniversary of the production’s first, fumbling preview performance, the producers of “Spider-Man” said they were considering new plans for recouping the show’s record-setting $75 million capitalization. The most unusual idea: adding new scenes and perhaps a new musical number to the New York “Spider-Man” every year, making it akin to a new comic book edition, and then urging the show’s fans to buy tickets again.

The producers are also expanding to all 50 states their radio campaign, inspired by rock concert promotions, in which listeners are flown to New York to see the show and then give reviews back home on the air.

And last Friday “Spider-Man” executives played host at the show to Brazilian journalists, as they had with media from Australia, Germany and Mexico, in an effort to turn the musical into a magnet for foreign tourists who speak little or no English, much as “Mamma Mia!” is now.

For the first time the producers — Michael Cohl, a former rock impresario, and Jeremiah J. Harris, a veteran theater executive — predicted that they would recoup the whole investment entirely from the Broadway run; they had previously said that “Spider-Man” would need help from United States and international franchises of the show to recoup. At $75 million the technically elaborate New York production is far more expensive than any show in history; most Broadway musicals cost between $5 million and $15 million. Though no plans for overseas offshoots of “Spider-Man” had ever been announced, the producers said they had been discussed recently but shelved in favor of trying to make it a blockbuster in New York, a strategy that would enable them to charge more for overseas licensing.

Yet any new productions of “Spider-Man” would have been complicated by a copyright lawsuit that the show’s former director, Julie Taymor, filed in federal court this month. The producers said their decision to hunker down in New York had nothing to do with the Taymor lawsuit, which they said they would fight.

Recouping on Broadway will not be easy, but nothing about “Spider-Man” has been painless, from its 183-performance preview period to the multiple injuries suffered by the actor Christopher Tierney, who, during one of those previews, fell 20 feet into a basement below the stage, stunning the audience. (He has since returned to the show.)

Weekly running costs alone for “Spider-Man” total $1 million or more, by far the highest amount on Broadway, while its net income has ranged recently from $100,000 to $300,000 a week. At that rate the show would need to play on Broadway at least five more years — and possibly quite a bit longer — to pay off debts, a run very few shows achieve. In other words, it would need to turn into a hit on par with “Wicked” or “The Lion King” (the latter directed by Ms. Taymor), which after lengthy runs still regularly sit atop the weekly Broadway box office charts.

“Before we mount ‘Spider-Man’ anywhere else, we want to make sure we have the strongest and most financially successful version in New York that we can get,” Mr. Harris said during the mid-November interview, held in his offices a few blocks from the show’s home at the Foxwoods Theater. For performances from last Tuesday through Sunday, which included the tourist-heavy Thanksgiving weekend, “Spider-Man” set a box office record for the theater of $2,070,195.60.

“The one thing about the brand of ‘Spider-Man,’ it’s not going to expire,” he continued. “If we show up in London five years from now, no one’s going to say it’s an old property.”

This bullish outlook derives from the show’s robust weekly box office sales since early summer, and what the producers say is $12 million in advance ticket sales driven by tour and school groups, and visitors from outside the New York region. (Those visitors from farther afield account for about half its audience.) Mr. Cohl said the musical has had advance ticket sales of about $1.6 million a week on average this month, a sizable amount. Those advance sales numbers could not be independently confirmed; they would be less than those for hit shows like “Wicked,” “Lion King,” and “The Book of Mormon,” but still enough to demonstrate staying power.

Mr. Cohl said he was also emboldened by surveys of those attending “Spider-Man” that indicate half its audience were people attending their first Broadway show.

Video

Hanging By a Thread

After a tumultuous year, the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” turns one.

“When people get off the plane in New York and think about Broadway show, we’re now one of the shows they talk about,” he said. “One year on things are moving in the right direction.” Last winter audiences were buying tickets at least partly in a ghoulish game of seeing what glitch or disaster would be next; now they know they are coming to see a finished show.

Turning a profit in New York would be all the more surprising given that “Spider-Man” was mercilessly mocked last winter for its high costs and cast injuries, and then opened to dreadful reviews in June. But the show has pulled itself together since its early previews, when performances would halt in mid-action so the backstage crew could fix technical problems with the flying stunts.

That first preview last Nov. 28 had five interruptions — “We’re going to stop,” intoned the voice of a production stage manager, C. Randall White — including a moment at the end of Act I when Spider-Man was left dangling over the audience as crew members struggled to reel him to the stage.

Mr. Cohl who took over as lead producer at the behest of the show’s composers, Bono and the Edge of U2, during a budget crisis in 2009, recalled a whirlwind of emotions as he sat in the orchestra section for that preview. He found himself dreading the media coverage, which had swirled around the budget, injuries and the involvement of the U2 musicians in their first foray on Broadway. But he was also frustrated that Ms. Taymor and her team had yet to finish a finale in time for the first preview.

“I knew the headlines would be: ‘ “Spider-Man” Disaster! Tied for First With Sinking of Titanic!’ and felt protective of the show,” he said. “But I also thought the ending we had that night was lousy and sent everyone home in a letdown.”

Ms. Taymor, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said she did have a finale being rehearsed that involved a huge mechanical net, which proved difficult to deploy. This finale was eventually added, then dropped.

The producers fired Ms. Taymor in March, concluding that she would not bow to their desire to change the darkly framed plot into a family friendly entertainment. Mr. Cohl and Mr. Harris said they, with their investors, made a loan of about $12 million to the production last spring to cover a three-week shutdown for the creative overhaul.

Even then Mr. Cohl, who helped to invent the giant modern rock tour with the Rolling Stones and U2, had misgivings.

“As we were putting that last round of money in, it was kind of like, ‘Oh God, we’re just out of our minds here,’ ” he said.

But now they are barreling ahead with the radio promotions and overtures to foreign news media, while focusing particularly on the idea of the current director, Philip William McKinley, to add material. “I want to tap the comic book roots and do a whole new issue of the show,” Mr. McKinley said. “A ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Issue 2012.’ And then ‘Issue 2013.’ ”

The producers denied that the idea was a ploy to persuade theatergoers that they would see an entirely new show or that it was an attempt to dilute Ms. Taymor’s copyright claims. (“Julie who?” Mr. Cohl said.) Her lawsuit claims the producers are using much of her original script without compensating her.

In a statement on Sunday Ms. Taymor’s lawyer, Charles T. Spada, disputed Mr. Cohl’s description of previous settlement talks. “The producers’ refusal to pay Ms. Taymor and to honor her creative and contractual rights, while continuing to use her work in the musical, can in no way be said to be fair or equitable,” Mr. Spada said.

The producers said that they would not settle the lawsuit, and that they believed litigation had an upside.

“Closure,” Mr. Harris said.

“The truth,” added Mr. McKinley, the director, whose work on “Spider-Man” was recently denied eligibility in the 2012 Tony Awards. Ms. Taymor — and the show itself — will be eligible.

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Turn On the Cash: After a Year, ‘Spider-Man’ Earns Its Keep. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe